One thing you will notice is that I broke out overhead into “scientific overhead” which specifically covers direct costs (such as renting lab space, hazardous material training and compliance, etc), which aren’t necessarily specific to Project Marilyn but without which Project Marilyn would not be possible. Of course, one of the major costs (labor) is not present because I’m operating Project Marilyn on a volunteer basis.

Not all of the purchases worked out. For example, the Liquid/Liquid extractor ($358) was a bit of a risk to try and improve the efficiency of 9DS extraction. But, on the other hand, buying it did make me realize that a soxhlet extractor ($108) was the correct apparatus to use. The lyophilizer (total ~$3000) was a big win, because the efficiency of 9DS production went up by somewhere around an order of magnitude due to that and the soxhlet extractor. Overall at the end of 2015, there was plenty of money still available for several months of continued lab work and the big purchase (xenograft mouse study).

If you want to skip directly to the donate link, go here. But really! You should read the whole thing.

Finding satoshimycin

As part of fundraising using bitcoin, I promised that if I raised more than 10 BTC (I got a bit more than 11 BTC total), I’d start testing other molecules in the 9DS family, one of which would be named “Satoshimycin”. Why do we want more compounds? Drug discovery is a bit of a gamble. Sometimes, drug candidates can fail in the late stage due to something you couldn’t have predicted from first principles. It would be silly to discount the 9DS family of compounds and, broadly speaking, the medicinal strategy, based on the success or failure of a single example. Given that drug discovery is an expensive process, one of the most effective ways for indysci to promote open-source pharmaceuticals is to shepherd multiple candidates through early stages, especially since within the 9DS family, the infrastructure and strategies are shared.

Luckily, this is a relatively easy process; the way 9DS is made is by feeding a molecule to the soil bacteria that produce sibiromycin. The bacteria integrate this compound by substituting it in the sibiromycin structure, effectively deleting the section that causes cardiotoxicity. If we feed a slightly modified compound instead, the homologous modification should be incorporated into 9DS.

In 2015, indysci’s Project Marilyn began scientific research.

In April, indysci began renting chemistry space from QB3, and I obtained a materials transfer agreement allowing work using the 9DS-producing strains to begin. The company Happilabs was contracted to do the initial lab setup, resulting in major savings. To save on rent, I chose to grow the bacteria at a home “biology lab” in the garage instead of at QB3. I began to practice growing sibiromycin, which is less complex and less risky than growing 9DS, in order to develop the technique and iron out any bugs in the process.